Jesse Matz, Kenyon College
"Time becomes human time to the extent that it is organized after the manner of a narrative; narrative, in turn, is meaningful to the extent that it portrays the features of temporal experience": perhaps the most important foundation for the narrative theory of time, Paul Ricoeur's famous summation comes to us through the phenomenological tradition. It has, as a main point of departure, Husserl's sense of the way the human mind makes up human time; and it has embedded phenomenological presumptions in narratology's dominant approach to the ways narrative helps us to make sense of time. Recent work in the study of cognition might change this dominant approach, in a surprising way.In work staging a confrontation between phenomenology and cognitive science, Tim van Gelder has shown how cognitive science has validated, fleshed out, and even improved upon phenomenology--at least when it comes to the question of time consciousness. Husserl had argued that our knowings of past and future are in fact present "intendings": they are retention and protention (respectively), and more like perceptions than representations. But how, van Gelder asks, can we perceive what does not exist? Husserl (and a long philosophical tradition before him) cannot really say; but cognitive science can. Approaching the question through work on dynamical models of cognition, van Gelder shows that what Husserl described does in fact take place in the human brain, where systemic "chains" create a sort of system flow matching the "simultaneous unfoldings" of past, present, and future in the Husserlian account of time consciousness. What had been airily attributed to "consciousness" (or, earlier, the "soul") now inheres in the physical matter of the brain.
Confirming but physicalizing Husserl's take on time, this cognitive theory could shift the terms of narrative theory. The difference here would have mainly to do with the change in the location of temporal "distension," and a consequent change in our sense of the cognitive significance of the narrative act. Naturalizing distension makes it something less in need of narrative's prosthetic enhancement; but naturalizing distension also makes it more perilous to flexible cognition. Response to these changes could lead to a rapprochement between what have long been opposed attitudes toward narrativity: where we now see a division--between those (Ricoeur, Brooks, Kermode) who consider narrative a necessary feature of temporal sense-making and those (D. A. Miller, Foucault, Bergson) who would align it with oppressive regularity--the cognitive approach to temporality could see a sort of pragmatic unity of approaches. For the cognitive approach could bring to narratology a pragmatic sense of the way the narrative act combines engagement and resistance in a sort of therapeutic remapping of the mind's dynamical landscape. [J.M.]